A man reborn: interview with Heikki Kovalainen

After two difficult seasons as Lewis Hamilton's team-mate at McLaren, Heikki Kovalainen is getting a fresh start with Lotus. And despite being at the back of the grid, he is really enjoying it, as he tells Edd Straw

By the end of his McLaren career, Heikki Kovalainen was so deeply shrouded in Lewis Hamilton's shadow that he periodically flirted with invisibility. Understandably so, for during two campaigns as the 2008 world champion's wingman, he managed only fractionally over half of the points (75 versus 147) and a single win to his team-mate's seven. The chance of a lifetime had gone begging and with interest only from middle or lower-ranked teams, Kovalainen was cast into the murky gloom of the depths of the driver market.

This year, after walking the plank of the good ship McLaren, he washed up at Lotus. Off the back of two years during which he all-too-often looked not so much number two to Hamilton as number three, in 2010 he is a man reborn.